


An Afternoon’s Entertainment

by Miss_M



Category: An Evening's Entertainment - M. R. James
Genre: Cautionary Tale, Dialogue, F/M, Folklore, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Post-Canon, Spooky, Storytelling, Supernatural Elements, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:35:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27726284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Grandmother tells another tale.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	An Afternoon’s Entertainment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havisham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havisham/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Fanny is older now and being courted by a solid young man of the parish. Her brother Charles having gone up to Oxford half a year past, Fanny loiters about the house, making her father cross and giving her aging grandam cause to pray that marriage will help Fanny settle, for if the girl is not talking to her granny about this and that and the other, then she is roaming about the parish, in the fields and the greenwood, sometimes paying calls but often just wandering untethered about the country.

It is a sunny afternoon in early September, and Fanny – who is to be wed at Christmas – is in the kitchen with her granny. Granny is baking a blackberry and rhubarb pie, and Fanny is seated at the trestle table, meandering through one of her tales, seeming to address herself even more than she seeks to regale her grandmother with her exploits.

 _Fanny:_ Miles says that we may still go out walking even when we are married, for he does love to roam, as do I! I do love him so, granny. 

_Grandmother (sliding the pie dish into the oven):_ You’ve got yourself a fine young man, Fanny, and well may you remember it. Not many young men with five thousand a year and his very own chaise would go roaming over hill and down dale just to please you.

 _Fanny:_ Oh I know that, truly I do. And granny, you need not worry about where we go walking. We never enter the wood at solstice or midsummer, certainly not midwinter when the night comes on so early and so fast and the shadows cluster so thickly among the trees. And we never walk up the lane with the blackberry bushes, though can you believe?! Miles had never heard the tale of Mr. Davis and his young man till I told him, and his family has lived in this parish since the Conquest. After I told him the tale, he first said he didn’t believe a word, and then I got cross with him for suggesting you made it up, and insisted we go see the man on the hill ourselves. Of course there was nothing to see, it’s just an old chalk outline in the grass and it was a beautiful May day, so Miles insisted there was nothing to it, but I told him that absence of evidence did not correspond to evidence of absence. Charles taught me that from what his tutor taught him.

 _Grandmother:_ Your brother’s tutor is a very wise man, I have no doubt, but I dare say he never lived in a place where so many odd incidents have occurred, nor so many people come to a bad end for dabbling in that which they never should have touched.

 _Fanny:_ What do you mean, granny? Did something else happen to anyone other than the men who lived in that lane? Oh please tell me! 

_Grandmother (sitting down at the table and taking up her knitting):_ Yes, yes, very well. Really, Fanny, you are much too big for such tales now. Yes, I said I’d tell you the story, and I will. Brew me some tea while you listen, there’s a good girl. 

Now let me see. This happened a few years before your grandfather and I were wed. In the village there lived a girl named Mary, whose father kept the public-house and whose mother was the finest seamstress in five parishes. Mary was a few years older than myself, yet unwed, despite her family’s situation. She had a bit of a reputation, Mary did, for she was ever so fond of her own company and would go gallivanting in the wood and up to that hill where the carving of the man looms. She’d go there at all times of the year, in sunshine and in the snow. And you should know by now that the man on the hill isn’t fit for young ladies to be looking at, for all that you all make your pilgrimages up there to see him, and you can cease your giggling right now, Fanny, or I shan’t finish the story or give you any pie, either.

Well, then. As I said, Mary was a bit wild and loved to visit the man on the hill. She’d come back from these expeditions, her hem muddy and torn, flowers braided in her hair, and singing all the way home. I remember how we would hear her song echoing over the fields, when the windows in the drawing room stood open on a summer eve. She had such a lovely voice, pure as crystal, as moonlight. “I will give my love a dwelling without e’ver a door, I will give my love a palace wherein she may be, but she may unlock it without any key.” That’s the song she would sing, an old song of these parts. 

_Fanny:_ And did she find a young man to go walking and singing with her?

 _Grandmother:_ I should think not! If the story ended so simply, it would hardly be worth the telling, now would it? No, Mary found no swain, for all the young men hereabouts looked at her askance, and you may be certain that Mary’s father and mother worried about her and wondered about the same thing you did. Would she find a husband? Would anyone want her, wild as she was? I remember once I met Mary at the village well. As I said, this was before I wed your grandfather for I was very young still, and one of my chores was that I had to fetch the water every morning. Mary had to do the same for her parents, and she was all of nine-and-ten already. I asked her, a bit peevishly perhaps, for I did not like the way the water would slop over the pail and wet my skirts, no, not one bit! I said, “When will you find yourself a husband, Mary? You won’t need to work like a drudge once you have a hearth and a man of your own.” She laughed at me, or perhaps merely at what I said, and replied, “Marry a man and be his drudge, you mean? I need no man who walks the earth. I have a man,” and here she dropped her voice, like she was sharing a secret, though we were the only two people near the well just then. She said, “I have a man who lives under the hill, and he provides for me in every way.” And she smiled, just like a cat with cream on its whiskers, and wouldn’t say another word more.

Well, I didn’t think much of it. Mary was always spinning tall tales and claiming that those who laughed at her and called her names for her solitary ways were ignorant fools. But then something happened to Mary. To tell you the truth, I never did learn exactly what it was, though people talked of nothing else that whole summer. Oh yes, you may well believe that many tales were shared about the parish, none of them kind or fit for young ladies’ ears, even if they have been sneaking off to see the rude man on the hill. _(Here Fanny succumbs to another passing fit of giggles, while her grandmother checks on the blackberry and rhubarb pie.)_ Anyway, as I was saying, something must have happened to Mary at midsummer, when all the young people went chasing each other in the tall grass and playing hide-and-go-seek in the wood. They all came home well before midnight, as was expected, but not Mary. Mary stayed out all night, and when she did walk home at dawn the next day, she was in her petticoat, and her shoes were gone. I saw her with my own two eyes, for I still had to fetch the water every morning, and so I saw Mary cross the village green in the pale hour of the morning, with her bare, muddy feet, and her ruddy cheeks, and the back of her petticoat stained as though it had been her time of the month.

 _Fanny (in a hushed voice):_ Did something dreadful happen to her, granny? Did someone – – ?

 _Grandmother:_ Something dreadful must have happened to her, but mayhap not in the sense you mean, Fanny. For while I watched Mary return to the public-house that midsummer morning, the thing I noticed the most, more than the state of her dress or her muddy feet, was the smile on her face. I never forgot it. She looked like she’d been to a fairies’ feast and had the time of her life, and was more amused than pleased to be back among us mere mortals again. Well, as you can imagine, her father and mother were not too pleased either, not that she’d stayed out all night, nor that she’d returned in such a state and for everyone in the village to see. They locked Mary in her room and gave her bread and water and her prayer book, and wouldn’t even look at her or speak to her till she confessed what she’d been up to. They brought the vicar to hear her confession, and people say that poor old gentleman’s face was as white as his surplice that he wore on Sundays by the time he left the public-house, and he swore that Mary would never be welcome in his church for as long as she lived, nay, nor even to rest in the churchyard after she was gone. That led to a dreadful row between the vicar and Mary’s father, but that’s a different story. Well, whether Mary ever came to church proved to be neither here nor there, for the long and short of it is that one night when the moon was full, Mary broke the latch on the window in the room where they kept her, and she climbed down the drainpipe, and she ran off.

 _Fanny:_ Where did she go?

 _Grandmother:_ At first her parents feared she’d been abducted and taken to London or worse, to one of the ports, but soon enough people started seeing her, just glimpses of her, running through the greenwood or among the fields in the tall summer grass, in her nightgown and her bare feet. Sometimes she would look at the people calling out to her and trying to reach her, and sometimes she wouldn’t, but when she did look back and stand still just long enough that they could draw near and confirm it was indeed she, the people who saw her said she would laugh at them before she’d turn and run off again, faster than they could run to catch her, and they said she looked like a real wild thing. Burrs in her hair, her nightgown a tatter no bigger than a napkin, her skin turned brown as a walnut from the sun. All summer long, people kept seeing her, like a fawn in the green. Now what do you say to that, Fanny?

 _Fanny:_ She was free. She was happy, alone in the wood and the fields she loved.

 _Grandmother:_ I thought you’d say so, but that is because you haven’t heard the end of the story. One day in September, just at this time of year, when the sun began to turn dull and the first autumn chill fell upon the grass at night, an old shepherd who tended his flock in the hills came down to the public-house and asked to speak to Mary’s father. And what he said was that Mary’s parents should not tend their hope of having her back again, not any more, for he was the last soul alive ever to see Mary. She’d been at the hill where the man is carved, and she’d been without even her tattered nightdress when he saw her, as clear as I see you sitting there, Fanny, and she’d been hopping about and singing. “Like a pagan prancing about, or like a filly in heat,” the old shepherd said, but then Mary’s father warned him to keep a civil tongue in his head when speaking about Mary and asked what had happened to his daughter that she would not be coming back. The shepherd said that he watched her for well-nigh a quarter of an hour, though it was getting late and he needed to drive his flock back before it was full dark, and when the sun dipped low and its last rays fell on that hillside, so that the rude man that is carved there blazed as bright as Jerusalem upon his hill, Mary cried out and ran toward the hill with the man on it, and between one moment and the next, the sun went down, and shadows fell upon the hillside, and she was gone.

 _Fanny:_ What do you mean ‘gone’?

 _Grandmother:_ I mean that she vanished clean off the face of this good earth, like that hill had opened up to let her pass and closed up tight after her, like the man on the hill had swallowed her whole. The shepherd could not stop and look more closely, for his flock needed tending, but the next day the parishioners went and covered that hillside calling out to her, and the squire lent his hounds to search for any trace of Mary. But they found nothing, and unlike those bad ghosts that lingered at the places of their wickedness that I told you about when Charles and you were little, no one saw Mary ever again. It must have happened just as the song she used to sing, said: she had opened the hill like a locked door without e’er a key, and her lover had made a palace for her under the hill that now she may never leave. And so, Fanny, it is all well and good to dawdle about the country and dream of what could be and what may have been, but mind that you don’t let your feet carry you too far, to a place from which you may not return, and nothing any of us could do – not me, not Charles or your father, not even Miles – would suffice to bring you back.

 _Fanny:_ I suppose so.

 _Grandmother:_ You suppose right. Now fetch some plates. The pie is done, I shall cut a slice for you to take to Miles, and you may have some after supper while you sew your trousseau. And light a few tapers while you’re at it. The days grow shorter, and the light is almost gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I used the [Rude Man of Cerne](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/06/the-rude-man-of-cerne.html) in Dorset (NSFW) as the model for the man on the hill. Mary’s song is the English folksong [“I Will Give My Love an Apple,”](http://www.stephengriffith.com/folksongindex/i-will-give-my-love-an-apple-i-gave-my-love-a-cherry/) also from Dorset.


End file.
